Last week, when I signed onto this account and prepared to figure out what I might do about posting and privacy around here, I noticed the little

“Howdy, how can we help?”

chat box pop up in the corner of the screen.

I started typing:

“Well, I was just sitting here and trying to determine if I should set my blog to private again, because I really am at another crossroads of purpose with this space. Part of me feels like I should keep it up because – dammit – I lived through this and this is my record. I hold out a half hope that someone will find this space and find the right sections to read and decide, ‘Dang, this person needs some help with this project.'”

Then I hit something and the little box disappeared and so did my words, out into the ethers.

I think I deleted them.

For this latest installment, there is a smattering of recent emails. It may seem a haphazard assortment – a mix of communications to self and others. However, my purpose in putting these thousands of words here is to begin (or to continue) my experiment in self-presentation and representation..which is a means by which I am able to remind myself that I am able to concurrently exist in my multiple worlds and also to keep track of what those worlds might consist of.

The impossibility of accurate portrayal is a nuisance and a challenge and an endless fascination.

Tonight, I bundled myself against the cold of the mountains to go watch the film Our Nixon with Mechanical Eye Microcinema. The movie is an assemblage of vernacular documentary footage and old self-surveillance reels from the rise and fall of the Nixon administration, an entertaining and dismaying testament to the spectacle that is power and persona in American politics, a complex simulacra, where public and private are one and the same and everything is a showman’s game.

I understood, in a deeply personal way, the desire to document, out of wonder and for posterity, to be a fleeting but certain witness of one’s own life.

So, here are 23,400 words…that say something – though not everything, not by any stretch of the imagination – about the recent weeks, the depths of Autumn.

I didn’t say enough about:

– the dreams I have had recently [note for remembering: dog cart, and underwear, the feeling of summer in the forest, at the edge of a field, all those people/car in midair and the lucid moment of dimly wondering how I might brace myself to survive the fall into the mountain, to live through the crash that I was suspended within

– a burgeoning interest in the hoodoo arts that is not remotely about novelty, that is so serious that I probably won’t say much about it all here.

– the fact that there are no pictures of foam swords my children and I have constructed. i don’t seem to be taking pictures lately, which is interesting.

– descriptions of the peculiar fuzziness of mind lately, the ringing in my ears that barely ceases, the way my eyes (after certain days) have begun to look green at the edges again. did I mention that I had a concussion?

Hey, I fell asleep early after a long day of looking at schedules and options for every possible mode of travel and making phone calls and agonizing over my capacity to make a valiant journey northward in the face of adversity…and am getting ready to go back to bed because the snow has set in here and it’s looking like the kids might have a snow day tomorrow and so I’ll need to help figure out what’s happening.

It’s such a wrench in intention and plans, but to be honest, I was feeling a little bit of trepidation about the trip to begin with, ’cause ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ It doesn’t help that I have been having powerful lucid dreams about traffic accidents and being disoriented in strange towns.

The cancelled flight felt like a knock out punch this morning. In my narrative of heroics, I should push myself to stand, to get up, to muster my forces of resilience and innovation in bravely passing through a gauntlet. ‎All things being what are they are, however, I am preparing to accept that I may not make it up there and that I’ll need to make arrangements to get people their money back. ‎The plane ticket can be used for some other trip, sometime…and though there will be some losses (funds and opportunities) incurred…but shit happens and l am having to be realistic about my ability to push forward with planes being grounded in the region and not an abundance of options. ‎

I am disappointed, but the process of discerning what I needed to do and accepting the reality of where I’m at right now and my ability to buckle down and get there…it’s not been for naught.

It’s really important to me to refund the donations people offered in support of this effort and I really want to give you your contribution back – for some of the same reasons that you want me to keep it. ‎Hey, what if I Paypal’ed you 40 bucks in support of and appreciation for your work and it wasn’t the same 40 bucks, if it was a different 40 bucks…and then when we hang out one day, we can spend 80 bucks to do something awesome together.

‎How are you?

My kids were happy and surprised to see me this afternoon, asked if it was bad that they felt glad that I hadn’t been able to go on my trip. Apparently, they’ve been heartily wishing that I was going to be home this week. ‎:)

Hey, re: Love and Logic. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to change times. New students come almost every week, referrals, and it could make for a lousy first experience with the class if it wasn’t happening at the time that someone showed up, after getting a ride or walking or something.

I wonder if we put together some simple handouts on Using Creativity to Build Relationship and Have Fun with Kids together, the outing could be a hybrid practicum of some sort, if students got a handout of creative activities to do with kids/family that they could look at and then put it in their pocket? I could make up a Love and Logic exercise that uses creative activities as an opportunity to practice using choices to develop shared control in relationships.

That would be a nice thing to have, a handout like that.

Then ________ could do the class at 11:00, since you don’t necessarily need the classroom, as you’ll be out…and do a module and go over the same creativity handout.

Creative Exp. + Love/Logic people can go to the gallery as a practicum in parental self care and as it relates to being creative with kids, encouraging kids’ creativity.

‎Note: that this is so long indicates that I am probably needing to take a break from email for a bit. So, I might be slow to respond to discussion about next Thursday.

Let me know if _____ has any thoughts, or I could just ask her. I think it’s more a matter of how can we support students who want to do both, without compromising access to a court-ordered class for other students.

Thanks,

Faith

‎Re: Radio, i.e. not work related and optional reading, no response is necessary

So, you just missed the Peter Murphy song re: “look for what seems out of place” and “you know the way” – I know the name of the song, but it’s a little dramatic and possibly triggering.

The Boss was the last I heard before getting home after being stuck in traffic on the 26 and missing the narrative medicine session. The Peter Murphy song was on right before it I think. Thank goodness I missed Adele.

The play list was a little off tonight, not especially mind-blowing.

Nonetheless, the Peter Murphy song confirmed to me that there is something peculiar/magic about that station because it was that exact song that I considered offering up as an example – as we (I) talked this afternoon about themes in playlist… the sort of themes that run through certain songs in the popular and subpopular music of past few centuries, these themes are – as the Murphy song is – couched in metaphysical transformative hoodoo and psychospiritual transgressions.

They just put the Adele in there to meet normative expectations of popular music playlists on the radio, also because Adele did the song for the spy movie and has anachronistic stylings. ‎The Boss adds texture and grounded nostalgia, Americana.

I didn’t mention any song as an example of the sort of songs I am referring to, because then I might have to explain what the song is an example of and why it correlates with several dozen (hundred?) other songs as indicators that:

A) people who make music lose their minds

B) there is an unseen world of informed universal forces that travel throughout human myth and consciousness

C) themes of metaversal surveillance and interconnectedness are exploding onto the independent and boutique folkrocktronica scene

D) radio is so super cool and powerful

‎…and I didn’t want to get into all that at work. Therefore, I feel that this message is outside of the range of appropriate after-work communications with a co-worker.

Yet, I don’t want to erase all that about the radio, because I freaking love the radio and find it fascinating and important.

Usually they only play that Peter Murphy song in the morning, at like 8:00am – which is a bizarre and incongruent hour to play ‎that song.

‎Have a great weekend! I think the double class plan might be a good direction to explore.

I can put these times in my calendar and make arrangements to hold those times.

Are there particul‎ar agenda items or a specific process that you all have in mind?

I can put together a go-over of my thinking about what points of information, reference, or knowledge might be most supportive, and am open to suggestions or preference re: focus and format. I could have that done by Monday, November 24th, and welcome input as to what might be most useful.

It seems like there are a few things that might be nice to have clarified prior to ______ entry into the position (e.g. the future of mutual aid organizing support calls‎) and I am interested in whether or not there is a particular work area or project that _______ may prioritize at the outset of her work, and how I might be most supportive, as able and appropriate.

Does anyone have any time to check in next Monday or Wednesday, prior to 2:00pm?

Thanks –

November 18th via Giveforward, to [undisclosed]:

Hey – Here’s my half of our 80.00 extra special day or event. I added in 4.00 for associated service costs…and ’cause 44 is a cooler number than 40. Feel free to spend this however, and know that when we need our 84.00 dollars, it will somehow be there.

When I was writing emails about refunds and what not, my phone super randomly pasted the words from your email, in big font: You are out money whether you go or not and you do enough good work in teh world that you don’t deserve to lose money due to shitty travel shit. …and I was like, yeah, right on phone, absolutely. I am going to keep donations from my mom and other family-ish entities, to cover things that can’t be re-booked or vouchered, room share, training fees, one train ticket, etc.

I appreciate your support…and feel your not wanting me to pay you back. I want other people to pay me to be myself and to reimburse my voluntariat work. It’s kinda an economic justice issue in my mind.

I haven’t checked in with _____ yet about whether or not I have clearance to attend tomorrow’s quarterly meeting, but the kids have a 2 hour delay this morning and rather than having my mom come into town to get them to school at 9:45, I was thinking maybe it might make sense for me:

a) come in at 11:00 and do the class ____ was going to cover, then leave when I am finished with my billing and after I check in with a couple of students

b) just have ____ show _______ and not be there today as planned so that – if ____ clears me to go tomorrow afternoon – my hours won’t be in excess working regular days on Thursday and Friday.

Hey, I really appreciate the openness that you’ve shown, ______ – and your willingness to post your thoughts here. ___, I also appreciate your perspectives and I’m sorry the group was an unhelpful space for you last week. I understand that it is difficult to step into a new social/support milieu and that when what is happening and how the space is held is not clear that that alone can create a sense of unsafety and uncertainty that can cause tension and anxieties. The ARMHC has framed itself as a “support and discussion” group for a long time, recognizing that people’s support needs are not always met and that sometime support comes in the form of simply connecting in conversation with people and hearing of other people’s experiences.

As a group that is “by-and-for” people with lived experience, leadership has always been encouraged to be shared/flexible – recognizing the challenges of organizing and holding space when people are faced with their own challenges to wellness and communication. there are some members who have been core active members for the past year+ and those people are ________, and others…and, as noted, there are a lot of folks who have been around for a while and who have stepped up to learn more about facilitation and how/why the group holds space.

The current scenario is indicative of a need to have a means by which new attendees are oriented to the group’s structure and purpose and I’m personally sorry that we’ve not been proactive in supporting newer attendees ‎in getting a better idea of how the group operates.

I appreciate that you felt confident in sharing your support needs and perspectives on group health and function, ____. I also hear ____on feeling that last week’s meeting was a little derailed after the question of splitting into small groups was brought up as ‎an option for how to spend the 2nd half of the meeting. The group generally tries to not spend too much time discussing leadership and group structure during Tuesday meetings, because it does – as people observed – shift the focus of the group from being a place where people are able to give voice to how they are doing and what is happening within their lives to a space for deliberation of the how’s and why’s of group convening and facilitation…which are important things to talk about and discuss, but which are generally addressed at organizing meetings, which have been held “as able, as needed” – but, which could probably stand to be held monthly.

So, if these bigger questions of group structure and function and purpose come up within Tuesday meetings, we generally ask that these these topics be “tabled” until after the meeting or an organizing meeting occurs. Group members are always welcome to offer feedback here or pre/post meeting, and I am appreciative of people’s clear ideas about what is important to them within the group.

I also want to re-clarify that the proposal/suggestion to break into small groups during the last 1/2 hour of the meeting last week was not a decision, it was a question, and it was not intended to apply to any meeting other than last week’s…and was really just an effort to say “hey, I really need to talk with someone and I don’t want to dominate the group or make it all about me, is there someone who would come talk with me”…and I thought “small groups” would allow for other people to spend the time in ways that might suit them/be helpful or useful. When we have open-social-time at the end of groups, it is basically an unstructured form of meeting in small groups and so I was confused about why people felt so strongly about things.

We have had people come into the group before who had an interest in openly challenging a lot of the why’s and how’s of the group and to critically analyze the integrity of the group without knowing much about how much work is done to keep the space going or much insight into why and how the group works. I, for one, am always happy to hear feedback and to learn of people’s ideas about how things might be done otherwise, and a lot of the ideas shared in this thread are really helpful in thinking about ways to be more inclusive and more democratic in our function and decision making.

I’m sorry that the group was difficult last week and that people felt variably alienated and ‎unsafe and anxious in the space. I left early because I wanted to check in with/connect with ____ and I felt good about the time that we spent out streetside, like that was what needed to happen, like I needed to sit with my friend on the sidewalk.

The group cannot always and will not always be a great space for everyone who attends and we do try to let folks know that they are welcome to take a break or ‎be elsewhere as needed, and to not speak, to cry, to crochet, to draw, or to rock or curl up in a ball if needed.

We do not expect the group to be able to be perfectly safe and supportive for everyone in every moment, but do hold the expectation that people will do – as individuals – what they need to do to take care of themselves and to make an effort to be kind and respectful of one another…and that people will be upheld in their individual realities and perceptions and accepted for where they might be in their perceptions, thinking, and feeling. It’s often a delicate compromise between individual needs and group needs.

I am appreciative that the group matters enough to people and is important enough that folks are willing to put forth their concerns and I hope that everyone is able to be kind and compassionate in responding to people’s participation. The group is not a place for competition and is not a place for silencing, as those dynamics are harmful to many. We are all doing our best from where we’re at right now.

Speaking of, my flight to the training was cancelled and I am having a really tough time figuring out how to get up to Massachusetts today. There has been some stuff happening here (at home, at work, in my personal experience) that are compounding my difficulty in mustering valiant travel efforts…and so I am here in Asheville today. I may or may not go to the meeting. If I do, I’m happy to spend time outside of the larger group with people who have an interest in processing or further discussing last week’s meeting dynamics. If I attend this afternoon’s meeting, I would prefer not to facilitate, and will likely be rather quiet. I don’t feel like the group is particularly supportive of my personal issues as they exist in the immediate and that the space is not what I need for support right now, but it is still an important space for me.

Thanks for being out there, and thanks for offering up your honest perspectives and reactions. If I have learned anything from being a part of this group, it is the value of difficult situations and uncomfortable scenarios, the way that my reactions to people and circumstances and needs can inform me of what needs healing in my heart and in my head. Accepting others as doing their best and viewing things that are tough for me with compassion has helped me to learn more patience with myself, more acceptance of myself and given me ample opportunity to reflect on how I want to move about in the world, what I want to bring and the impact of perspective on my reality and experience.

I have to go make breakfast for kids on 2 hour delay and then figure out if I am going to try to get up north (probably not) or just go to work and then carry on.

It’s been the weirdest day…going from packing and weaving through anxieties in getting ready to leave to all of the sudden, “Oh, there is no plane…”

I think I talked with you last time this sort of thing happened, last November. :)

I have been having terrible fears and premonition-y feelings and dreams lately, very vivid, though possibly metaphoric…the first thing I heard this morning were awful sirens…and so the cancelled flight and need to find another way feels like either a test of my faith and willingness to persevere in the face of fear and adversity or a warning, protective forces at work.

Then I think, cripes, if I am caught in a mythic narrative conflict of purpose and responsibility, maybe that’s a sign that I need to stay closer to home and not bust my ass to show up to something so far away.

When I was trying to leave this afternoon to go to Charlotte to try to get on a possible alternate flight, I just kept puttering around the house, and when I’d make steps toward putting my things in the car to two hours to try to maybe get a flight from Charlotte, my heart would start pounding and my mind would go blank and I’d feel sick to my stomach.

I think I should just go to work tomorrow and do my navigating extreme states class and just carry on.

I want to give you back your donation though, and so don’t be surprised if I just paypal it to you or make a donation back to you.

I am glad that I don’t have to talk to big wigs today, ____. Thanks for sharing what’s going on in the program you’re involved in…it sounds like a lot of the bigger questions around peer roles and peer identities and what exactly “the job” that is getting done are live-and-in-person in the situations you describe‎.

I just went back to my job as a peer in a state-funded setting, for reasons not motivated out of a political/personal desire to “be a peer” ‎- I like the work as I am able to do it in the program I work within…but, I still struggle with the “peer identity” and the implicit disclosure therein. For the most part, I find value in being able to share elements of my own experience in the process of therapeutic work. Disclosure creates vulnerability, and thus the potential for trust.

Sometimes, that freaks me out, because relationship and mindful participation in communication are both challenging realms for me. I try to avoid generating or allowing for over-closeness, and the structure of the role re: professional boundaries of involvement and relationship ‎are helpful, and provide an opportunity to talk about vulnerability and connection and expectations/parameters in relationship.

Depending on the details of the crisis triage program, if a lot of multiple steps toward determining the crisis and finding out who is involved in the crisis/needs to know about the situation, and helping a person to access the support they may be seeking…well, there is a lot of getting the job done, doing the papers. If peers are doing this, they are functionally diminished in their capacity to provide peer support, which is listening and creating a space (sometimes through disclosure, and sometimes through active listening, or even motivational interviewing) where people can be empowered to connect with what might be most helpful, what their options are, and to be supported in hope and resilience…or something like that.

If the pressure is on and there are a million calls to make and forms to fax, the capacity for peer support is strained, because of the nature of the work, the tasks.

I think peers that are having to do this work as part of their peer role can still be “peer” in the process of exploring options and making arrangements. Not all peers have lived experience of crisis intervention, either voluntary or involuntary. Some substance abuse peers have never been hospitalized. Everybody’s experience is different, but it seems like peers who have had lived experience of crisis intervention are in a position to know how truly shitty it can be to try to get help or to have help being sought for you, and so can be compassionate and try to make the process less truly awful for the person. Disclosure can sometimes make a difference, but – really – in my experience, the police officer in my kitchen didn’t disclose to me that he or someone he cared about had lived experience, I could see it in him, in his eyes. He was kind, and respectful, but – of course – doing his job.

I was in a position at some point last year to really step up and be in a role of peer leadership in the organization that work for, but it wasn’t for me at that point, because of my own capacity and ability at the moment. I found it so strange to go to leadership team meetings. Like, I was “the peer” or something. I sometimes liked the challenge of showing up calm and professional, as that side of my potential/occasional self, but other times the significance of the bigger picture and how completely assisine and dysfunctional the whole system is was just too exasperating and disturbing and my face does strange involuntary things in meetings.

I usually try to do visualization of myself as calm and effective if I have to talk with someone about something important and of consequence. I have been trying to limit such communications lately, in order to be able to show up and function well in the communications that matter, like at work with other people and their lives, their days, and with my kids.

It’s all overwhelming, so I breathe and think of the most concise way I could make the best use of the opportunity to talk with people in power about ways that things could be done better.

I am also sick of pro-peer rhetoric, and avoid ‎it when possible, though I do enjoy telling people what a peer is – which is inherent disclosure, though vague. I think “all things peer” is a generally more desirable direction than “getting the job done”, but it’s not so much about peer support, it’s about “getting the job done” – the job being to treat people well and compassionately as a means to provide a foundation for supported self-directed crisis navigation, for the purpose of minimizing the risk of traumatization stemming from callous, cruel, efficient, de-humanizing, stigmatizing, judgmental, brutal professional people wielding power over what happens in one’s life and to one’s body, where one goes (is “sent”) and what happens to them there.

So, the work is to not be that, to be kind, to be respectful, to try to empathize and to reassure, to create safety, since most crises are rooted in a lack of safety in some way or another, in multiple ways…

I am writing too much…probably trying to keep myself oriented toward what I think about the peer work situation, all the ins and outs and pitfalls and precipices involved, as your message spurred a lot of thought.

Ps. Yeah, it has been quiet on this listserv. I have been trying to minimize my online communications, and have been dropping off the face of the planet in some places and showing up erratically in others.

I am now going to go do some laundry. I was supposed to leave on a trip this afternoon to go to the alternatives to suicide training, but the flight was cancelled and I guess I ought to figure out what to do about that… :/

may there be resolution…

Oct 18

to me

Last night, I pulled into the parking garage just as the sun set and the street was seeming busier with all the sudden headlights. It was the time of day when the early diners began to finish their dinners and ease out onto the sidewalks, to slowly weave their way, little full throngs, with arms round waists and moving together, through the straight walking movie-goers, the knots of lines leading into restaurants, people waiting. I don’t remember what song was on the radio, because I wasn’t thinking about the radio.

It costs 6.00 to park in the garage on Biltmore, and I was feeling something acrid about the fact that I should have to go anywhere at all, much less that I should have to pay to go.

There were a lot of ads on the radio yesterday. The last one I remember was for Zia Tacqueria, a 5.00 for 10.00 worth of food deal, as I was turning left, passing by the Food Co-op. ‎The next song was, “I’m going to make this place your home.”

That might not be correct. I may be misremembering. I know I heard that song yesterday morning, coming out of the thick French Broad fog, into the sun near the airport with the sky hanging down all over the mountains. I heard that song on the same exact stretch of road last November, going to the airport in the dark, in the very early morning.

She is beginning to think about herself as 3rd person. What did that?

The small dog stood at the top of the stairs, barking at wind.

In the morning, she had been thinking about the situation again. She will not say that she had been thinking about him, because pronouns make people and people are trite. It wasn’t about romance, and that is what it would be made to be, if she were to say that she had been thinking about him.

She thinks about a lot of people. No. She was thinking about the situation.

Maybe it is about romance.

She wills herself to speak from the I.

Right at the place where the lanes shift, going over the highway bridge, I wondered what you would think if you knew.

There was that song, “I will wait for you,” playing on the radio, but I think I was thinking about you even before then.

[________________________________________]

You probably have been.

I crossed a line right then. Didn’t I?

Still, I felt myself wanting to tell you, to tell you about this situation.

There is no situation, other than I think that I have chosen to be alone until such a day when what it was that made the sky explode when we laughed and what it was, in the precise dearness of your eyes, returns to me, by you or by some other…but, oh – how could it be that my heart is still so broken feeling over the thought that I will never get to see you look up again.

I feel good about this decision. I feel that it is honorable, and true.

Maybe this will change.

I am okay with wanting and not getting what I want. There is some sweetness in it, the feeling, something that feels like humility, or maybe it’s just the settling for the feeling of love without needing to hold onto someone, to ever even see them again.

My throat hurts when I think that this might be true, that it is entirely possible that I will spend my life without any sort of love that is the sort of love in which someone finds their correlate, the person with whom they feel like children brand new and old friends familiar.

I would rather wait to find you again, in someone in some life, and we will laugh and make the world change. We will be warm like baby birds and our backs will be strong. You will let me sit with my back against yours, and I will know that you love me like something rare and precious, the odds of which the world will never understand, as it was always a longshot that I should have that in my life. Maybe it wasn’t a long shot – maybe it was always meant to be and this is how I get it, to just – at least – get to know that there is a person out there whom I love enough to never see or speak to again and to know that unless whatever that person embodied returns to me, I will not share my deepest laughter and love with another human being in this lifetime, that I will wait, and we will find one another again.

This is probably just trauma-based avoidance of certain expected human functions, like intimate adult relationships. ‎How perfect and innocuous that I can make this deal where I will cuddle up with a quiet loneliness and waiting for something that cannot exist, such ease.

How convenient that I should choose celibacy.

This isn’t about avoidance. Anything other than what I felt with you is not worth my time and would be a lie anyway. I don’t know why such a deep friendship and ease should be rare in my life, that I have known it so few times, but it is…and I don’t need to involve myself with any paltry or perfunctory, empty and nervous relations.

The effort to navigate all of the esteem and safety and acceptance landmines that are laid out between any words like “dating” or “love” is not worth whatever I may find with anyone who would require me to navigate the treacherous pablum of “boyfriend.”

So, yes, this situation works out quite well – a strange, celibate amour.

Last night, I pulled into the parking garage that I used to park in when I worked at the museum, and I squeezed into a too small space and hefted a box of unprepared art supplies out of the back seat. I had just gotten off work an hour before and I knew I should try to shake the feeling of resentment that I had over my inclination to spend money on art supplies for other people, and how stupid and selfish and petty that felt.

I wasn’t feeling good about the evening. My sweater was too hot. I was hungry. I hadn’t had the energy to communicate with people about facilitation or intent of the event. I didn’t care. I had been thinking, in the morning driving work, right around the thinking I had been doing about my celibacy, and what I was willing to give my time to and what I had decided I would rather just wait for…that I should make a proof regarding my theory about clouds and gods and forces, consciousness and electricity, the numinous origins of all myth and written language, radio reception and archetypal energies cast by the magnetism of the stars themselves into the manifest mind and expression of a million humans across all space, time, and happenstance.

That would be a worthy life’s work, to develop such a proof, in whatever way one could. My friend told me about this book, and I am going to read it and learn the criteria of a legitimate proof, and then I am going to set to work in developing such a proof, the likes of which the world has never seen.

My head feels hot when I write these words, knowing that I could do such a thing, if I chose to, and that – again and again – I choose to.

I just have to figure out how. This is a longterm project. I have said for years that this is just the beginning. The world is not so slow as it was. Probably someone will articulate precisely the proof I have fumbled and I will still be here wondering where I could possibly find the time to read all of the books I might need to read, to establish that – yes, the origins of human language are in the origins of humans relationship with the sky and with the wind, the deep felt swirls of knowing and force that shape the world and are writ into our own consciousness.

Oh, algorithms…geometry…physics and myth.

I just took some more pictures of clouds.

Today, I am making plans to collect a thousand acorns, for an art project that I will do next week.

I was able to see ____ for a minute when they were in town this weekend. It was lovely because they were content to see me for 20 minutes at a park and then say goodbye.

It was a remarkable 20 minutes actually, as we were trying to find some acorns for a project I’m doing on Thursday with folks from the REC and we came across a (very) late season violet in bloom (a violet in October?) – deep, deep purple, a single bloom. I should’ve eaten it. All the acorns we found were already sprouting and setting out roots, which I’ve never seen.

____, who had been whiny about looking for acorns, found what appeared to be an old twisted tangle of dead sticks, picked it up and declared that it “looks like a trident.” Looking more closely, we saw that it was some sort of vine that had fused to it‎self where it crossed, like had seamlessly joined to itself.

Of course, as ____ and I were standing there by the parking lot, getting ready to say goodbye, some random awkward teenager in a small tophat walks ‎up and gestures to the stick that ____ had found.

“What’s that? It looks witchy.”

We shrugged, as he proceeds to show us the book he’s carrying, The Big Book of Witchcraft, and tells us that his friend who is “like a healer or a schizophrenic or something” spoke with the spirits of Native Americans at the park where we were, right over by the baseball diamond.

Go figure…

Anyway, all is relatively well, just juggling the multiple lives and feeling very disconnected from the movement and organizing.”

We sat in the coffeeshop last night and painted small pictures. Someone said to me, “under commit, and over-deliver.”

Earlier I had been thinking how unhelpful and binding a belief it is to think that one has to prove God as part of their life’s vocation. Some part of me, the imagined mind of my elder aunt or ex mother-in-law says, indignant and even offended at the foolishness, the audacity of such a belief, “That’s insane. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

They don’t understand. Like I’ve said, people like me (?) are not supposed to dabble in proving God. It is not my place to be doing anything at all like that. A person like me has no business trying to do something like that, not even as an art project.

Rubbish.

Lately, ‎I have been astounded by the fact that I really truly and actually got to sit with the experienced and deeply felt reality that something ancient and important was coursing through the world, to see and feel and know things that I never knew before, and to understand that it is real, and to laugh and weep with the faces in clouds, to read their shapes like messages.

That still, I am able to exist in a world in which all that is good and evil are pulls and blooms and rhythm, to ponder what may appear to be miracles.

I have known an awe that I feel may be quite rare.

Thus, who am I – so ungrateful, jaded! – to be uninspired?

My own little salvation means nothing.

That is not true. The mechanics of salvation ensure that joy and peace are powerful, and that the heart itself – in the quietest ways – can be an architect of great transformations and healing, even in a moment that nobody sees, that nobody even knows about or ever will.

Really, though, what good is it? To show someone the history of the world unfurling in light and vapor in the sky, etched in sand and signaled in coincidence, small exchanges…I am not comfortable thinking that I should be eternally amazed that such things are real.

Of course they are real…

I have no salvation, not yet…if I did, I wouldn’t be so struggling in heart, my peace would feel more genuine, my jubilation more jubilant. I am still negotiating with fear and sloth, childish resentment that I should have to be anything at all, that I should have to try so hard. <- this is bullshit. I would die in so many places.

‎I wish there were someone I could talk with about this. I don’t want to give up my belief that I have to somehow contribute a proof. Knowing what I know, I don’t feel like that is an irrational belief. It is a complex belief. It is a complicated belief. It is, in ways, a dangerous belief. However, it is not – as I understand it – irrational.

Oct 21

to me

‎I wonder what the economy would be like if it were based on people discovering their passion and working within it. By passion, I mean whatever practice, work, or endeavor promotes deep feelings of aliveness and rightness, the truth of us and who we might be intended to be.

What if, instead of structuring the American economy around goals of profit and property, we set our goals toward recognizing, nurturing, and utilizing each persons unique, individual strengths and capabilities?

The entire structure as we know it would collapse, almost immediately, as the vast majority of jobs in the American economy (metastatic multinational exploitative capitalism) are nobody’s passion, and while some may utilize strengths and capabilities, they do so in a way that is brutally exploitative, using labor to create wealth for a few, and harm to many…a true sacrilege, in any system of belief – the most basic economic error in terms of “good.”

When I think about this, when I really, deeply think about these things, the ways we have been debased and abused within our collective human history and by our collective ‎human history, how we have been constrained to existences that deny us our potential, our God given rights as human beings, to think and to feel, to be deeply connected to one another and to the earth and stars themselves, to find meaning and purpose in the truth of our hearts and to know, to really know, who we are and how truly fucking amazing the world and metaverse genuinely are…well, I feel sick…woeful and angry, outraged and sad, a blur and flurry of feeling, imagining what could be, how the world might be different if we oriented our lives toward what our heart tells us that we love, to know what that is, that sort of deep gratitude and wonder, that adoration and amazement over the fact that any of this…any of this…exists at all.

I have been shocked lately, at the thought that I might be the most jaded person in the entire history of the world. “Really?” I think to myself. “Really, you got to see and get to see what might be a great wonder of the known world, the world of ages, all worlds known to man and mankind…you saw the hands descending, you saw the weeping eyes, you saw the crown and chalice rise up from the hills, lit in gold and the air as thick as manna. You felt the ghosts of the masses split open your bones. You wept. Not once, but many times, you wept, knowing what it was to hold what felt like the entire history of the world and universe, from the very first spark and the bones of the dinosaurs that burn in our cars (our motherfucking cars) and you felt this and you stood in the shoes of a hundred thousand – a million! – people, stood with their bare feet on the hot sands. You were given gifts, a signature in a digital copy. Great lengths were gone to in making arrangements for you to be shown. Time was slowed down. The cars were silenced. People were notified. You, silly insolent selfish girl (this is what I tell myself), were a part of something enormous, you are a part of something enormous.”

I think about this, as I drive to work, feeling content in my day. “Am I the most tragically jaded and broken person on the planet, to not be walking around with my heart blown open, completely and utterly in awe all the time, because ALL OF <THIS> IS REAL?

How can I possibly feel depressed in a life like this? What in me is so wounded that I must struggle so to rise up? Do I really not care?

Then I remind myself that regardless of what I do or do not do, the truth shall be known.

<but what if the entire history of the future relies on a series of events that I am vital in helping to catalyze?>

[My heart just seized up, the great tremoring stirring about, breathless and hurrying, wanting to burst forth. My God, do I really walk around with this thought, do I exist with this thought, this belief, all day long, every day…that positive outcomes in the entire history of the future relies on something I may or may not do or say? I mean, my mind really unspools a little at that. Then, I reason, that “Well, yeah, every single thing that anyone does or doesn’t do impacts the future. It’s simple evolutionary theory.” Usually, an inside voice – a voice of thoughts, that has no voice, other than a feeling that might be a sound, the memory of a sound, the sound of my own voice – shouts out. “No! That’s not what I’m saying and you know it! You know that you believe that you and your kin, your mad dispersed kin, your long lost tribe, your human folk, all of you…you know that you’re important. It was proven to you. You know that something in your heart is connected to people and places across the ages, that your consciousness touches ghosts. I reason, “So what, that doesn’t mean I’m important. Maybe my work is already done. It’s not like it’s a big deal that I have an art practice, that I believe in ghosts. Lots of people do. It’s not like it’s weird. Lots of people live in a world like this, feeling these things.”]

There is another voice then, an image of a man in a button up shirt, with a big belly, and a shaved face, saying something about…

(Hmmm, I lost my train of thought…)

This was all just free-write. I don’t remember what I sat down to say. Oh, yeah, what if the American economy was structured around people’s innate and evolutionary strengths and capabilities, instead of around the accumulation of profit, power, and property.

Things would probably be a lot more interesting.

I’m sure there would still be people who like to make spreadsheets and haul rocks. The entire convenience oil industry‎ would probably fall in on itself, replaced by community co-ops and biofuel farms run by all the people who dream of running biofuel farms, with innovative labs to discover and implement new energy technologies as a form of arts and entertainment. There would still be rock shows, but there would be no superstardom, no celebrity capitalism. Football would be replaced with boffer, the big screen arena televisions would show timelines and absurdities of human history. People would wear costumes, non-licensed, handmade. Military installations would be unfenced and converted to state of the art housing and education facilities to be operated as transitional occupational development communities for people who are released from the prisons, their drug charges tossed out. Select prisons would be converted to state of the art rehabilitation centers for those afflicted with sociopathic tendencies related to indoctrination into compulsory capitalist cultism at a young age…but, first the prisons would be torn down.

Etc. Etc.

“That’s ridiculous. Go fold your laundry.”

Yes, yes. True. True.

Oct 22

to me

This morni‎ng, I had the thought that I’d had a dream about this, about my older child wearing a Motley Crue shirt to school and that leading to some sort of distressing and absurd scenario. In the imagined dream that I think I remember, the shirt was red, like his sisters. The lady selling them gave us 2-for-the-price-of-one.

I think, in remembering that dream, anticipating possible outcomes and events, I can undo the likelihood of bad things happening. I just have to tread carefully.

Oct 25

to me

As a person who lives in the United States, it’s not unusual that I should be inclined to think about surveillance.

Ever since talking with a friend last night, I’ve been thinking about this matter of surveillance and psychiatry. This thinking has unspooled into a few different imaginings of essays and blogposts, articles and references. Yet, at the center of it, is the recollection of standing there with my friend on the street in Philadelphia, with the crowd up the block with their signs and the traffic hustling by like nothing was happening. We had just met, and I was wearing a gold dress. My friend was talking about his dissertation on madness and surveillance. I think I must’ve only nodded when the understanding exploded in my mind, at the sweet moment that it made perfect sense that I should think about being watched, that anyone ought to have thoughts about being watched…since we’re obviously and openly being watched all the time.

By my calculations, even amongst regular people, high tech spy narratives aren’t implausible, circumstances being what they are.

It’s exciting to think about what might happen when the logic of it all sets in, when a great mass of people suddenly know that it makes perfect sense that people would freak out and get caught up in complex paranoias regarding surveillance, espionage, and high tech global plots involving secret societies and the salvation of the world.

Our government itself is caught up in complex paranoias, endlessly enacting measures of control and supervision. Everybody wants to save the world, to save the country.

Aside from the video cameras that are fucking everywhere, and the high-profile widely publicized cases of espionage and data collection‎, how many American movies feature themes of being the chosen one, of an everyday person becoming integrally involved in some fantastic and almost unbelievable story that shatters their known reality and impels them into the role of the hero?

How many models of matrix reality have we been taught in the movies we watch? How many systems of totalitarian regime, of fascism and human oppression…how many dark futures and black pasts have we been shown?

What is the split in consciousness that allows for some to not know that this is now, that this real, that this is happening.

It’s that sort of thin line between life and the movies that I am talking about.

Since beginning this message, which began with the intent to digitally note the notes that I made on a sheet of manila-tone paper late last night, re: madness, surveillance, and psychiatry, I have left the house and returned, having shown up briefly to a discussion/focus group that is affiliated with ‎this research that I am involved with. I got there on time, drew on the couch for a few minutes and thought about paintings, the people sleeping upstairs. I ate some turkey bacon and had a conversation about the Motley Crue and Alice Cooper show that I took my children to on Tuesday.

It turns out that they are capable of going to a rock concert in an adjacent state and then waking up to go to school the next day.

‎I forget what I wanted to say…the kids will be here almost any minute. There is laundry to fold, paper towel tubes to recycle, emails to read and to compile.

I have an idea. Several actually.

Lately, I’ve been driving a lot and that’s where I get some of my best ideas, driving and listening to the radio, whatever is playing.

Last night, on my way to Marshall, I heard a sermon. It was all about developing a discerning spirit and fine tuning one’s sensitivities to orient toward the Holy Spirit and to be vigilant in our wariness toward the devil.

‎I like Marshall. The Court House there has this amazing set of windows wrapped round its dome, lit by the most stunning blue light.

My friends and I stood on the quiet street across from the court house and we talked about the brutality of middle school, the isolation of experience, why kids lose their minds, how damaged we all are. We shifted our weight from leg to leg, swaying like anemones as we spoke in the dark.

Oct 27 (12 days ago)

to me

Pearla and Pleura. They are both pretty sounding words.

I can’t tell the story of either of these words, these names. I wonder though, if it was Pearla that I meant to say.)

I have recently been in the position of reading resumes, for a position that would be much more difficult to hire someone for if not for the work I’ve done, and it has been elucidating, to see how certain resume formats resonate with me, and the way certain cover letters can inform the impression I might make, even the assumptions I may draw about a person, based only on their tone of writing and syntax, what they choose to say, how they choose to say it.

The conversation surrounding the reviewing of resumes was difficult in ways, fascinating by and large. The question came up, “So, what if someone searches this person and comes up with their blog and thinks, ‘Is this really the person that I want helping me to…?'”

Amazingly, that question, framed as hypothetical, was not about me, though it felt like it may have been…but, that’s only because I have concerns and paranoias about how this digital archive of self-to-self and occasional self-to-others experiments in narrative, perspective, and conjecture, this excoriation of a fragmented personal history that is deposited here only as a means to prove that I exist, that I existed…not as others see me and know me, but in shards of my whole broken-as-fuck humanity, all forgotten selves revived, again and again, gasping for air on the banks of the river, plunging back in with the gar.

…and to be able to say shit like that, because it is fun to say…and important to say, because it is real, and this matters and I should not have to be the only one who must hold consciousness of the fact that I sit there and think about thinks like citizen surveillance and I follow the NSA on twitter, because why shouldn’t I?, and I wonder if it is even okay for me to consider such things, such realities, and I know that it is not, that I should not be thinking about such things. That I should, alas, be thinking about other things.

I don’t think about anything for too terribly long, other than everything all the time, but there is so much everything, and so little time and yet so much, that only peaks and partials and loose associations rise up consciousness, behind whatever else I need to be thinking about or am thinking about, like dinner and household to-do lists. I am thinking about household to-do lists as I write this, whatever this is, and I am feeling like I should probably just get up and begin to do things, right now, at 9:45pm.

In any event, that question, framed as hypothetical, about “What if someone Google searches this person…”

When I was 15, I gave myself a tattoo of the Chinese character for Harmony, on my hand, with a needle, thread, and India ink, and when my mother asked me why in the hell I had done ‎such a thing, I told her that I had tattooed my hand because I never wanted to “work for the man.” I was fairly immature about a lot of things, just like I am now, and wasn’t entirely clear on just how big and vast and insidious “the man” is and that it still takes great engenuity, authenticity, and real-live practical skills coupled with appropriate opportunities make ones way without somehow working for some aspect of “the man”.

‎I have to go do some dishes.

Oct 27 (12 days ago)

to me

‎If psychiatric drugs act on our biological brains, which they do, the problem is still biological, but still a mystery, because what part of the brain or function within the brain governs the will and vigor of an instinct to live? Is suicide biological if damage to or tinkering with the biological brain can induce self demise? What about the heart, the mind? Agggh! What’s what? (Note: I personally do not think that suicide is biological, but maybe there is a biological landscape that contributes to suicide?

Oct 28 (11 days ago)

to me

‎Next month, I’m going to be going to the Alternatives to Suicide training at the Western Mass. Recovery Learning Community.

I don’t talk too much about suicide. I guess I talk about it much more than the general population, who barely talks about it at all, saying only that it is terrible, and that nobody knows what to say.

Through continued work as a peer in a state-funded recovery education center and community organizing with vulnerable folks and people who are struggling, as well as being friends with complex and amazing people who reckon with their own mortality and will to live as par for the course in living, I spend a lot of time with people who want to die or who are recovering from wanting to die.

Wanting to die, and thinking about dying, visualizing ones demise, is itself a sort of death, deeply traumatic in my experience.

Part of my intent in attending this training is to gain a sense of calm in reckoning with my own self-harming and self-destroying past and to learn how to better hold space for people to consider their own relationship with suicide, wanting to die, and living. In spite of the hours of training and intensive experiences, as a survivor of attempts to kill myself, and a person who still struggles with aspects of experience that challenge my commitment to being here, I find it rather difficult to quiet my own mind and heart to be present with other people’s pain, and I find that I want them to live much that the thought of them dying makes me feel angry…and though I temper the flare in my heart, I bring that into the space, in energy and voice, in my eyes. I can feel it push through the kindness, the love, busting its way into my gaze, hard eyes that say, “Absolutely not…you will not tell me that you want to die and then go kill yourself. You will not do that to me.”

That isn’t exactly helpful, I know.

I think it’s entirely possible that I have unresolved grief and trauma – both from my own experiences of living through wanting to die, and from knowing people who died, from being the last person that someone spoke to before they died. Because my own history and all that I carry impacts my work and my relationships, it is important to me to continue to seek deeper and more resilient healing.

I want to be able to speak articulately about suicide, and to share my experiences as an adolescent and young adult who lived in a state of “suicide risk” for many years, and who tried – and failed – to inflict mortal harm upon herself twice, and challenged the fates in life/death games way too many times to count. I want to explore the possibility that being put on and taken off of and put back on numerous psychiatric drugs known to potentially increase the risk of suicidality may have contributed to my having spent the vast majority of my developmental years not wanting to be alive at all.

It is difficult – nay, dangerous – to talk about suicide, especially my own suicidality. I live with a certain vulnerability to involuntary commitment, given my history and circumstances.

I have children, after all. However, because my children are growing up in a world where people kill themselves, because they will likely have friends who want to die, and will probably know someone who kills themselves, because they have already known people who have died by suicide…well, I feel like it is important that I learn how to talk about suicide.

Because my children know people who have died by suicide and because my children ask questions, and because I try to tell them an appropriate and objective truth, we have already talked about suicide, my children and I.

“Have you ever wanted to kill yourself?”

“Yeah, a long time ago. Most people do, at some point or another. It’s a terrible feeling, with terrible thoughts.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever want to kill myself.”

“I hope you don’t ever experience that…but, if you do, please talk with me about it. I am definitely a person who you can talk to about things like that.”

It’s beautiful, the way that what we might learn in our own dealings with death can end up saving other people’s lives.

I am writing to inquire about possible volunteer opportunities at your 2015 Spring Conference in Henderson County, North Carolina.

Early last month, I came across the conference flyer at a local coffeehouse and brought it home to read it. I intend to return it to the coffeehouse, as it is a very nice brochure that I am sure other people would be interested in seeing. The brochure caught my attention, because dowsing and metaphysics are – I am certain – very relevant to…who I am and what I am seeking to understand and exist for within this lifetime.

I suppose it could be suggested that dowsing and metaphysics are relevant to all humanity and to everything that might exist beyond life times, and so my claim of personal relevance could be a little silly.

Constantly now, I have to remind myself that it is very likely that whomever reads these words has no idea who I am, knows nothing of my story, my interests, my integrity, or intent.

I could be, for all anyone knows, a total yahoo.

Such things are relative.

I wonder, does the dowsing community often receive messages from people who are astounded by an unfolding awareness of and attunement to their most deeply human capabilities and connections? Do people tell about ghosts in childhood, of travelers and intuitions, of visions and inclinations, about the things that they imagine they are able to do, the things they have seen and felt and brought forth?

I don’t know anything about dowsing. That’s not exactly true. However, I am not aware of much dowsing history or the specifics of any dowsing-related practice or endeavor. I didn’t think much about dowsing at all, except to know that it exists and that it makes sense, in the same way that I know that birds migrate and that it makes sense.

When I was trying to figure out what was happening with me and with the world when I began to see that forms could arise in the sky as if called, as if willed into being by the sheer force of my amazement at seeing them there, I wondered if what I was doing (if I was, indeed, doing anything) could be a form of dowsing, feeling the water in the median sky, connecting to it, stimulating it, being stimulated by it, making manifest the rudiment patterns of all nature and showing the relation of all forms and all beings.

I also wondered (and wonder still) if I was simply out of my mind, engaged in a complex hallucination brought about by acute trauma to my human core.

I do not actually know if I am crazy or not. What I do know is that I have spent a good portion of the last little bit of my life ‎taking thousands of pictures of clouds, because I thought – foolish, foolish – that I was proving God by showing the symbols in the sky.

Nobody could see them. A few people saw them. I have thousands of pictures.

This is the point at which I begin to sound insane, desperate even, when the enormity of what it was that I went through really settles into me and my own conviction arises again.

When things get this far, I cease to care what people may think, so strong is the urge to say, “Please help. I need to talk with someone about this. This makes a lot of sense to me, and I feel it in my bones that this is the path to my most true vocation, my most true way of being in the world, a state in which I am free to share my seeing of the world and to be who I am‎.”

I am a person with an atypical processing style and a long history with ghosts. I learned how to swim in brackish water. I almost died when I was kid. I have witnessed – as all people have – amazing and terrible things. When I was 34 years old, I started to notice that the clouds didn’t look like they used to look and I began to pay attention. During that time, my marriage was breaking down into radioactivity and my children were crying a lot. My dog – who I considered to be an angel-dog of some sort – was hit by a car. I lost my job because I started weeping almost everytime I laughed and could not sleep well. In a way, watching the clouds while my bones split open in grief and wonder was like finding whatever might be called God. I suddenly knew things I had no way of knowing and understood things that I had never understood. My whole life came back to me, and so many other lives, in image and feeling, words and voices, the expressions of strangers. I saw the sky as it may have appeared thousands of years ago, as something alive and of integral importance, a portal and place of communion that touches everything in the very air that we breathe, the wind.

I read over these words and they are paltry. People spend their entire lives trying to figure out how to concisely and effectively describe the awe of seeing and feeling the world clearly, of knowing that everything that once seemed ordinary is magical and that the magical is, at last, ordinary.

7:35 PM (23 hours ago)

to me

The other night, my housemate – who is a young woman from Florida – and I talked about witchery. The subject hadn’t come up before, at least not directly, and I had to remind myself that the vast majority of people really have no idea what my internal world consists of. I wonder who I am to my housemate, to my co-workers, what I look like to them, what my voice sounds like, what they might imagine I think about. Chances are good that nobody spends much time wondering what I think about, what I see. I find that I spend a lot of time considering what other people might think about, and reminding myself that I know nothing, nothing, nothing, that I only imagine things and make assumptions.

Why is it that every time I tell myself this, there is some voice that rises in me, a voice that is clear and simple speaking and that I recognize as my own voice, the voice of my most true self…that says, “That’s not ‎Faith. You feel their stories, you get images.”

I argue with this voice, and say, in a fumbling response, that it is rude and presumptuous, invasive even, to think or to feel that I know anything of someone else’s interior world. I know nothing. I know nothing. I know nothing.

I say this like a mantra almost, an act of both contrition and humiliation, a statement of factual acceptance.

“Oh, this self-deprecation is nauseating.”

Believe me, I know.

Is there a myth about a person who, in the error of their humility, refused even to be who they are, lest someone think they think something of themselves, this person who could never claim and exist within their gifts, a person who could not ever – even – speak of their world, because who is so arrogant as to think that they are special?

There is a feeling like tearfulness, and the voice that is my own says, exasperated and woeful of the tendency to forget, the absolute sloth in resolve, the obtuse and bumbling layers of scarred and effortful lives, the way that everything is not fucked up at all, but is – really very much – extremely fucked up…because look at this, she is forgetting the point again.

Everybody is special. That is the point. We all have superpowers. We are all so human.

Well, yeah…

The point is not those words. The point is the feeling that I get when I write them, with a blur of image and memory and everything in whole right there in my mind and the dogs running around the chair, here in front of the fire where my legs are burning and the soles of shoes are becoming too warm.

I used to sit in front the fire at my great-grandmothers house, a dangerous old natural gas heater, with the blue flames in a row right there, not behind glass at all, but caged in seering hot metal cage. I’d sit as close as I could, right where the heat was on the edge of unbearable, and I’d sit until my legs turned red and itchy.

I think it has something to do with feeling, sensory stimulation.

It took me a long time to understand that I don’t feel things the way other people feel things. I do not know how other people feel things.

I know that when I make space for myself to remember, and I am constantly remembering, precisely who I am, in my own story – not the story that other people might see my life as, but my very own perspective of myself and my life and the whole entire history of the universe and of the future…when I make space to let the reality of my experiences within subjective reality sink in and become my own…well, I almost lose my mind.

There is something powerful in the way that thoughts about how incredibly fucking magical every single human being and living thing on this planet really, truly, astoundingly is…I can feel it. I can see it. A space in the cavity between my lungs feels heavy with something that might be joy.

So, it doesn’t matter whether anyone else gets it.

What the fuck was I talking about?

Oh, yeah, witches, and the way my housemate was surprised when I didn’t seem ruffled by the mention of the possibility that I might be some sort of medium or something, based on my wanting to be Amelia Earhart for Halloween and then part of Amelia’s plane being found on the 30th. I was fairly nonchalant in response to the suggestion.

In my private life, I maintain conscious awareness of a few ghosts. Many, in fact. They – the idea of them and the plausible reality of them, things being what they are – are friendships that I cultivated during a time in my life when I had no discernible friends, other than animals, wind, and strangers, old acquaintances. Why do I feel like it is so weird to have had significant experiences of ghost realm interactions – or what one experienced and noted as being such? I mean, lots of people have many experiences and they always have.

Truly. That is exactly what I meant to say.

So, ghosts…who cares…‎big deal…lots and lots of upstanding Catholic and Christian people all over the world have had extensive and deeply personal relationships with ghosts.

However, because I am not Catholic or Christian, though I believe in something called by many names, my believing in ghosts, and saying things about believing in anything is…

What? Where the hell did I get this shit, that I’m so weird and flimsy that I’d believe in ghosts. The ghost of my favorite dead uncle wants to kick someone’s ass for thinking that ghosts are some kind of hokey joke cheap thrill made up shit.

That was kinda a joke.

Get it?

Even my communicating such as above is patently not okay. I am not supposed to communicate in obnoxious conundrums for my own stimulation and enjoyment, even in emails to myself, because – really – I am the only person I can talk to about this.

I probably need therapy.

Ya think?

Sigh. As I was saying, my housemate and I were talking about witches and powers, forces and physics, history and cosmology, miscellaneous memories or correspondences, family trees and places.

We all have so much story.

I had thought, in a longtime, about the fact that I have no idea who my paternal grandfather is. I know his name, his last name. I don’t know how to spell it though. My dad probably does.

Isn’t it weird that my dad is that kid, that baby, that so-and-so’s father or grandfather or brother had and that got taken back to Tampa, married into another man’s name, all when he was little and then nobody ever knew anything of him at all. My dad is that baby, in that family, whose last name I do not know how to spell, my unknown uncles and aunts, possible cousins. I have hardly any family. Two half cousins, two aging aunts, an uncle by marriage. My parents. My brother.

I should ask my dad how to spell his father’s last name. I probably won’t though, because…

I don’t know why.

I don’t think I’m a witch. I don’t think I’m a medium. I think I’m a human.

‎In thinking about this, however, I did write an experimental letter to the dowsers, as a way of exploring what my own intention was and what I was even thinking about when I considered trying to volunteer at the 2015 Conference of the Southern Appalachian Dowsers, “Dowsing Our Way Out of the Global Cul de Sac.”

Apparently, I’m pretty confused about my identity and life direction, which is evidence to me that I am not some dowser metaphysician, because my own life is so poorly discerned and chaotic feeling.

“Not really,” says objective reality and perspective of gratitude and relative awareness of how incredibly fucking lucky I am.

I laugh at the “Luck! Luck! Wicked thing! Luck is a plaything of the devil!”

Perhaps…

‎I probably won’t try to attend the dowser convention. Probably not.

I don’t know.

I don’t really want to be anything, but I still seem to have some hang up about the whole cloudcalling thing. I cannot let it go. Why would I? Wouldn’t the letting go of “that whole thing” prove that I didn’t believe that it was real and that it mattered? Oh, I see. That is why I am supposed to let it go, because it was not real and it doesn’t matter.

In response to that, I feel something like hornets in my chest.

9:49 AM (9 hours ago)

to me

‎Sometime late last night a British metalcore band called Schemata Theory followed me on twitter. Of course I followed them back, because that’s what I do when metalcore bands follow me on twitter. I listen to their songs, too, and like them on YouTube, etc. Sometimes, if I especially like something about one of their songs, I’ll tell them in a comment or a message or a tweet.

I find that metalcore and post hardcore elicit in me particular feelings of rising-up and fist-in-air. I remember, when I listen to music that is heavy and fast and screeching, preaching really, what I felt like when I was 16 years old, 15 years old, 22 years old…and I remember that among the few things I have been certain of in my life is the fact that capitalism is the devil’s economy.

I am supposed to start working on a Master’s thesis in January, and I have been working under the assumption that I am going to write some qualitative trope on motivations, barriers, and supports in mental health activism and advocacy among people who identify as having lived experience of severe persistent mental illness. I feel a little excited about it, but not really on fire. I think that within that work I might be able to help to articulate some difficult realities about the unpaid marketplace of voices for recovery, and to gain important insights into what supports sustainable and rewarding involvement in efforts toward systemic transformation ‎within mental health and addictions recovery service models.

This morning, listening to that song and reflecting on other songs I have had the pleasure of listening to, experiencing, and being educated through…I remembered that I once thought it possible to make an entire career out of studying the thematic arcs within popular music genres and how music both reflects and creates reality.

When the police killed Keith Vidal, I listened to that Memphis MayFire song that he played drums along with about five times. I read the words and even posted them into this blog entry in my dusty space on Mad In America. I really don’t think that Keith Vidal was mentally ill. I think he was a smart kid who’d been through some stuff and was sick of North Carolina.

‎Why don’t adults pay attention to the fact that movies, music, and books matter, and can inform us of entire worlds? Frozen, that Disney movie, spoke to millions about the difficulty of having powers that can cause harm if not understood or used correctly, and showed clearly the misery and tragedy that may come of trying to hide one’s strange gifts from the world, rather than trying to nurture them.

I am just going on and on now. I should write an essay about music, content analysis, and cultural competence when working with youth and those who maintain subcultural identities.

My writing mind has not been well. It is recovering from the past year of emails and “collaborative” writing in which things I said were rarely said correctly. While I didn’t exactly take these instances of being inadequately articulate as personal, the habit of watching what you say and agonizing over whether or not someone will read your words as being insufficient, offensive, or just wrong is a difficult habit to ease out of, particularly when the level of hyper-awareness born ‎of justified concerns over social safety has become a way of life.

I have begun to achieve a deep and sincere degree of not giving a shit what people think of me, of not taking it personally and being my authentic self to the extent that is possible and/or appropriate to the circumstances. Nonetheless, awareness of a tendency to communicate in a way that people find oddly off-putting or inaccessible, due to their own frameworks of meaning in regard to communication and the reality that, um, okay…yeah…I really do kind of think differently and experience interactions differently.

Jeering, “You’re not different! You’re just weird and neurotic!”

Soothing, “That’s not true. You do think differently. Everybody thinks a little differently. Some people think much differently than other people, and experience thought differently. You have had to spend your entire life trying to make sense to people and to be palatable and pleasant to other people. You have shown yourself to few, rarely felt ease. You know this about yourself. Even if you were – in the beginning – not that different. [Chimes in, “Oh, but you were! Oh, but you are!] You are different now, because of what has happened to you and what you’ve made of it, because of how you continue to be, because of who you have become, who you are.”